Authors: Geoffrey Household
‘What would you do with the Punchao?’
‘After a reasonable interlude I would put it back in the museum with an armed guard.’
‘It must be destroyed.’
‘Don’t tell it so.’
‘You are absurd.’
‘Not absurd. Merely respectful. It hasn’t finished with me yet.’
‘Then the sooner you get out of Malpelo the better.’
‘I entirely agree, but I think I shall be lucky if I am allowed to get out before His Excellency has got the full story from a prisoner – if, that is, the dozens of prisoners can
still talk. By the way, who knows that you have visited me?’
‘Nobody that I cannot trust.’
‘Then you are very lucky. I cannot trust anyone. There is Hector who is defending his mother-in-law. There is you who would cheerfully see me drawn and quartered if it would help to keep
the Punchao out of Heredia’s hands. There is the British Consul-General who would gladly ship me home to be gaoled by British police. And, now I come to think of it, there is that unfortunate
lass whose wedding dress I stole.’
‘You paid for it.’
‘That was a miracle and doesn’t count.’
‘And if I asked you to go with me and recover the Punchao?’
‘I fear, señorita Teresa, that I could not refuse your request.’
I don’t think she had expected that reply.
‘Can you knock off work here any time?’ she asked.
‘Yes – if Hector can find an excuse.’
‘Very well. Then make your way to the little bit of a seepage where we landed and wait for me.’
‘Are you likely to be long?’
‘Get Hector to provide you with a car. I shall start tomorrow by horse. It will take me about two days to reach the village of Nueva Beria as it is called. I am going to return the wedding
dress secretly, and then I shall find you.’
‘Good God, why take the risk?’
‘So long as no one sees me, it will all be a part of the miracle.’
‘And then?’
‘You and I recover the Punchao and take it to the headquarters of the Retadores. That is where I was going when I swam ashore.’
‘You haven’t a chance against Heredia’s secret police.’
‘I do, so long as Heredia’s thugs do not see me leave my cousin’s house and believe I am still there. I shall be dressed as a boy.’
‘Papers?’
‘All in order. I am not an archaeologist, but is there any reason why the channel of the little seepage where we went ashore should not have been artificial?’
‘None except that it wasn’t.’
‘Never mind that. You are looking for the chisel marks of the Maya. Keep looking until I turn up. Agreed?’
Well, it was not going to be as easy as she thought. Hector could provide a car and some reasonably impressive story, but as a foreigner I should attract the attention of the mayor – if
the village was big enough to have one – and of the district police. The only safe solution was to lay in supplies and remain in hiding. We could presumably find an overland route to the site
of the battle and the waterfall without swimming.
‘Suppose I arrive long after you?’ I asked. ‘Where are you going to be?’
‘I haven’t the least idea. Somewhere not far from the point where we took the car. We came to the road through pretty thick cover, you remember.’
She rode away into the darkness, leaving me full of doubt. My dominating fear was that the battlefield would not yet be clear of saleable loot, and yet we were proposing to enter it without
being seen by scavengers or women searching for their dead.
Next day I rode down into Puerto Santa Maria, ostensibly to consult Hector about wholly imaginary chisel marks but really to put him in the picture. He thought that our private expedition would
end in murder and rape and that as the weather was due to break we could never repeat our swim round the point with or without the added weight of the Punchao.
‘And if you recover it, where are you going to deliver it?’
‘The headquarters of the Retadores.’
‘Which is never the same from one week to the next. What would your Teresa think if you delivered it to me?’
‘I don’t know. Probably that you would hand it to Heredia or Juana and then we should be back at the beginning with a change of watchmaker, a bigger guard and quite enormously bigger
lies from Juana.’
‘Can’t Teresa do this job alone?’
‘To be drowned or captured and shot?’
‘Ah, well, if you feel so strongly about it. And what do you propose to do if both of you get away with it?’
‘Return quietly to your dig if you leave the tent in place and say that your report of carved stones was just local nonsense.’
‘Where did we get it from?’
‘I leave that to you.’
Next day, Hector paid off the workmen and borrowed a car from the palace. Its number plate protected me from all police inspection. The driver dropped me in the dusk beyond the scattered houses
of Nueva Beria. The calling of a wild cat reminded me that I was utterly alone. There was no other sound but the occasional, distant grumble of the sea as the wind, still uncertain, turned to the
west. It occurred to me for the first time – there had been so much else to think about – that Teresa and I had scrambled ashore at the bottom of the tide.
I installed myself fairly comfortably in a hollow which allowed a glimpse of the end of the road and the roof of the cottage from which divinity had removed a wedding dress and was about to
return it, or perhaps had already done so. The first light of dawn revealed nothing but a tumble of stone where the road ended. There was no telling what divine compassion had been up to, and
nothing I could do except wait for the appearance of a boy.
All day there was no sign of Teresa or of any of the inhabitants of Nueva Beria. Evidently the end of the road was the end of civilisation. There must be a way to the beach of the battle but
clearly it swung round behind one of the two promontories and joined the path by which our force had arrived. The mountain gun which had shelled and utterly defeated us must have come up this way.
Either the path was almost invisible or we had been so anxious to reach fresh water that our late commander had decided to rest the column. I decided to search for this path, for it offered an
escape route if ever Teresa and I met each other and recovered the Punchao. Provided this lonely and uncultivated spot was as empty as it seemed we could be away before dawn. Extreme care was all
that was needed: to see before we were seen.
While the light lasted, I crawled cautiously up the slope of the southern hill from which I could look down on the battlefield. The Heredistas had lightly buried their dead and had thrown ours
into the sea assuming that the tide would carry them away. It had, and then successive high tides had brought them back again. Nobody had bothered to bury them, for none of them belonged to Nueva
Beria and the priests of the province were too busy with half-hearted denunciations of violence.
The wind began to moan down the little valley carrying the stench of the dead whom the tides had not reached. In the dusk, a woman was turning over the corpses to look at their faces. She had a
puzzled child following her about. How had they got there? Following far behind our retreat, perhaps, refusing to be evacuated with the mob. At last she lay down and the boy said something which
brought the tears again. I felt my own cheeks wet in sympathy. The solitary, searching woman would have torn the heart out of civil war.
The boy, I think, saw me but made no sign of it. Life and death to him were now intermingled. Was it a brother or his father for whom the woman was searching? The pair paid no attention to me as
I slid down from another world. The waterfall splashed down in front of me and I passed through it. Digging with my hands I soon found the Punchao. Reflecting the faint light of the moon, its
little stars also seemed to be weeping.
I climbed up the slope which we had all dashed down to drink and to cool our feet. A rougher track went straight on. Evidently it had been the route from another village to the sea before the
road to Nueva Beria was built.
I went some way down it, following the tracks of the mountain gun which had been hauled back to the temporary camp of the Heredista main body. There was no point in going too far from the
rendezvous agreed with Teresa, so I turned back, passing the head of the Valley of Death, and took position in thick cover not far from the point where we had waylaid the car. There I slept a
little till sunrise woke me and then set out for a patch of tall grass from which I could see without being seen. Teresa came from the direction of Nueva Beria where she had spent a couple of
nights in a tumble-down stable with her horse. When I showed myself, the first thing she said was that the Punchao had gone from the waterfall.
‘I know. I have it.’
I undid my shirt and showed it hanging on my chest in the place where Juana had intended it to be when she dined at Buckingham Palace – a most improbable destination considering that she
would have been without a husband and Her Majesty would have had to pass a note to a secretary to find out where in the hell Malpelo was. In some ways Juana was still the movie actress, magnificent
no doubt as a gracious hostess but as a guest in a foreign land too anxious to impress.
‘My horse is in Nueva Beria,’ she said. ‘Give me the Punchao and I shall be off at once.’
‘You knew where the headquarters of the Retadores was. But is it still there?’
‘I shall be told where it has gone. There must be someone left behind at their former camp who can tell me.’ ‘How will you identify yourself?’
‘I shall be recognised.’
‘Provided there is someone at the new camp who escaped from the massacre at the old.’
‘Of course there will be.’
‘What would he be paid if he buried you unobtrusively and took the Punchao straight to Heredia?’
‘None of us would be so foul.’
‘All angels, are you?’
‘You must not give it to Sir Hector.’
‘I have not decided.’
‘You shall not sell it back to Juana. Hand it over!’
She was so angry with me that she pulled a little .22 automatic out of the unfamiliar trouser pocket. I caught her wrist just in time before she could raise it and the bullet hit the ground
between us.
‘Just what I needed,’ I said. ‘But do remember not to pull it out of your trouser pocket with the safety catch off. Now go back to your horse and your family and leave the rest
to me. Whatever I do will be wrong but well-meaning.’
She burst into tears of frustration as I handed the pistol back to her. Her last words to me before striding away to recover her horse were:
‘Go to hell!’
I was getting weary of the Punchao. It was also extremely uncomfortable. I can only assume that women seldom wear anything of that weight. The more I thought about it, the less I knew what to do
with it. I wanted to hand it over to the Retadores, but the chance of me reaching their headquarters was slim. I had first to find them and then produce the Punchao before I was stripped and shot.
Hector was the only hope and I was by no means certain that I could trust him not to return it secretly to his mother-in-law. Of course I could always bury it again but the Retadores would be
informed through my cook or Teresa that it was, or had been, in my possession.
By this time, I knew the road back to Puerto Santa Maria and decided to walk for three nights to avoid being stopped and questioned. On arrival it might be possible to discover a fishing-boat or
light aircraft and get out of the country much as Teresa had got in. It was an appalling thought that on my chest I carried the hopes of permanent revolution together with Heredia’s emblem to
prevent it.
I had no trouble on the way and found my tent and the cook-house still in place. I thought it very likely that Teresa or my former cook would pay me a cautious visit while I
was asleep – and I was certainly going to sleep for ten good hours – so I took the precaution of lifting the Punchao off my neck, wrapping it in the sweat-soaked shirt I had worn for
four days, and hiding it in the thick, fleshy leaves woven round an old bird’s nest instead of burying it in the ground which they would carefully explore. The only way of reaching the nest
was by climbing a weaker, smaller tree with crowded branches and by swinging like an incompetent ape to an overhanging branch of the vulture’s tree.
Nobody woke me or left any tracks. I am ashamed to say that in the clear light of morning I hoped that the Punchao would have disappeared. It hadn’t.
I walked down to the nearest village and called Hector to demand a meeting. He said that we should not hurry it. His wife, the formidable Carlota, had arrived on a visit to her father. Quite
what she wanted he did not know, but it would be wise if he and I first met at, say, the museum. That would give us an excellent excuse for a private talk.
I was received by the permanent staff of the museum with profound respect. They felt a bit lonely and leaderless, for the curator had gone off to join the Retadores, a typical gesture of
intellectuals. Yes, Don Hector was expecting me. There was a knife of unknown metal that he wished to discuss, which he believed had been found near Nueva Beria. I am inclined to think that
archaeologists always have a high-sounding excuse ready for any activity.
I was escorted up to the curator’s office where Hector sat professionally with a scrap of flint on the end of a microscope.
‘Ah, Hawkins, just the chap I wanted,’ he said. ‘What do you think of this?’
‘What am I supposed to think of it?’
‘You found it in the rubble at the end of the road two metres below the original level and it is obviously worked.’
‘Well, I’m not sure what date that would make it, but they hadn’t got matches. I understand that Doña Carlota has arrived. How much does she know?’
‘Nothing but a four-line report of the battle in
The Times
. Nothing at all about the Punchao which was the chief reason for it. Nobody except that wretched girl knows yet that you
recaptured it and there is no reason why she should be mentioned at all.’
‘Which side will your wife be on when she has the whole story?’